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Posted on Saturday, 11 April, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
I generally like Eric Hobsbawn’s “you’re all wrong and here’s why” attitude, often reflected in his writing. On Friday he has written a thought-provoking piece on how both centrally state-planned economies and unrestricted free-market capitalist economies have both run their course and need to be retired before they destroy the planet. And I like his use of the phrase “ideological logos.”
“The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another,” He writes, basically getting to the point I sort of drifted around in this post, but much more succinctly and with less leg work.
The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the “capabilities” of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy – not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.
A shift in tendencies, that sees economic systems as tools of societies, instead of societies as fuel for economies, seems to be the general order here: A decentralized commons-based approach.
via Eric Hobsbawm: Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?
Posted on Monday, 30 March, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
The G20 protest was a pagent nearly as vacant in substance as the summit upon which it was based
Welcome to my G20 blog entry. As someone with a keen interest in the crossroads where activism, technology and ideology meet Weeks like this one, in which the 20 countries identified as the global economic drivers (and their various hangers on) weeks like this are what I have instead of Christmas. Demonstrators are everywhere about everything and using all sorts of different means to get their points across. I took Thursday to check it all out in person and followed the rest via emails, text and avid news reading. I blogged most of this in morning or evening commutes.
Monday, March 30 / 10:14 pm / Blackfriers Station
These are interesting times for big ideas. The air in The City has an electric current of fear. There’s no real frenzy, but you can feel the occasional tingle. The G20 economic summit hits the ExCeL Exhibition centre in the Docklands on Thursday and presidents and anarchists are swarming in, attracted to the scent of an open wound, both hoping to feed off it, all of them using it as an opportunity to float grand schemes, new world orders or at least quick fixes.
Get some more of this post
Posted on Thursday, 26 February, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Fun to look at, but not so productive: that remains my analysis of the strip-off tactic that’s gaining in popularity among certain cause-head circles. The anti nuke crowd joins the Cycling for climate control crowd and the general PETA prediliction for stripping off for their cause. Here we have an entry in the Anti-Nuke Beauty Contest from the Trojan nuclear power plant in my old stomping grounds of Oregon.
Once the togs are tossed, do voyers really pay attention to the reason why?
- The Anti-Nuke Beauty Contest.
Posted on Wednesday, 28 May, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Posted on Wednesday, 16 April, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
During a typical daily trolling of the website BoingBoing, I came across the following interesting nugget about the state where I grew up and attended high school:
“The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.”
What you say? a government body copyrighting their laws and barring others from publishing them? Is this actually legal? Are Orgeon laws some sort of privately held intellectual property that turns some sort of profit?
Legal or not, it’s happened.
Being that copyright isn’t exactly part of the democratic system of government and that laws in Democracies such as U.S. states are generally thought to be, well, not “owned” by anyone exactly, but belonging to the people, I thought this was strange. However, as many strange things go, it turns out to be true. Both Justia and Public.Resource.Org have been served with cease and desist letters from the Oregon state government demanding that their laws be removed from public view on these websites.
Public.Resource.Org’s outlaw law compiler Carl Malamud wrote:
“Oregon is not unique in asserting copyright over state law, but they are definitely one of the more aggressive in this kind of FUD campaign. Justia and Public.Resource.Org have decided this is an important issue to resolve and we’re going to hold firm on this. Anybody else who is making a mirror of the Oregon law should drop me a line and let me know.”
It got me thinking about what the state can actually claim to own. Shouldn’t pretty much anything owned by the state be considered in the commons? If I take a picture of a state park in Oregon’s Columbia River gorge, am I violating the state’s rights by displaying the natural beauty of the state’s land without giving it compensation? If another state wants to enact one of Oregon’s more progressive laws, would they be barred from doing so? How does this effect other community-driven public information tools, like Wikidpedia?
I checked out the section of the Oregon State Legislature website where laws are, and as a web designer, I wasn’t too taken with it. Obviously, matters of personal taste are highly subjective. However, framed in one of the tasty pages here at drew3ooo, I think it’s a stunning work of art, and I prefer to be able to look up drinking ages and various age-of-consent prohibitions in the comfort of my own domain name. So, for all of you who don’t want to go slogging through the ugly, weirdly non-centered, image-heavy and non-web standards Oregon legislatures website to find out what it says about pumping your own gasoline or the the access people have to higher education awards while in internment camps, check out the Beaver state’s laws right here on d3.
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Today in the Why We Fail category: Required reading.
I’m constantly enthralled by the intersections between activism and technology. Mostly with the appropriate use of technology within activism. I’m also interested in the flip-side, the strange, sometimes horrifying decisions and their consequences made in the progressive movement. So I’m heading out right away to pick up a copy of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power or Organizing Without Organizations (which also has its companion blog).
Shirky works on open source collaborative applications that you may already be using. People opposed to reflecting on the futility of a lot of tactics going on in a number of social, environmental and political movements out there (hello you anti-war crowd who have yet to stop a single war) should consider the actions used to bring about actual change, such as Shirky’s oft used example, the Passenger Bill of Rights.
At the website for Harvard’s Berkman Center, Clay discusses the themes in his book, focusing on protest culture and the difference between institutional (what Code Pink does) Vs. ad hoc modes (what the WTO protests in Seattle did which shut that meeting down), and the lack of strategies combining singular acts of protest with ongoing movements.
The lack of ongoing strategy or a focus on tangible, achievable goals continues to wound progressive movements. Shirky’s analysis is well worth hearing out by anyone involved in organizing.
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And once again a group launches on an ambitious project that will eventually lead to another round of debate among those on The Left on the topic of “why doesn’t anyone take us seriously?
No more bogus ‘respect’ for fundamentalism within open societies. If you literally follow an ancient Holy Text – whether it’s the Koran, the Bible or the Torah – you will hold disgusting views about women, and you should expect to have them criticised and mocked.
